Ninety-eight German-language publishers submitted titles for this year’s award. Of those, 72 publishers are from Germany, 13 from Austria, and 13 from Switzerland.

Of the 156 original submissions, 89 were out in the spring and 53 are coming as autumn titles

In a prepared statement, Schröder says the material submitted this year runs “from the creation of daring literary dystopias to the representation of longing for new beginnings in other worlds; from the revolt against the inevitability of everyday life to biographical confirmations of individual self-images that reinvent experience in novelistic form.

“The linguistic diversity in the authors’ approaches to their material is vast. They don’t shy away from classical narrative any more than from an exuberant, humor-driven experimental delight in the use of language. In their respective forms the nominated novels also always reflect and grapple with social conditions.

€25,000 to the Winner

The next step will be for the jurors to select six titles from the longlist for inclusion on the shortlist, which will be published on September 20. The six shortlisted authors will find out which of them has won the German Book Prize only on the evening of the award ceremony itself. The winner will receive €25,000, the five finalists €2,500 each.

The prize ceremony on October 17 will be streamed at the prize site from Frankfurt’s Kaisersaal of the Frankfurt Römer. The radio stations Deutschlandfunk and Deutschlandradio Kultur will broadcast the ceremony as part of the “Dokumente und Debatten” programme on digital radio and as a live stream online at Deutschlandradio.

German online radio station Detektor FM has produced recordings of the reading samples from the longlist. Audio samples from the 20 longlisted titles are available here and on the Detektor app.

In addition, six literature bloggers have been selected to read the 20 books on the longlist, discuss them, and provide background information and contributions for critical debate. These blog posts can be read on the Facebook page of the German Book Prize and under the hashtag #dbp16.

About the Author

Porter Anderson

Porter Anderson has been named International Trade Press Journalist of the Year in London Book Fair's 2019 International Excellence Awards. He is Editor-in-Chief of Publishing Perspectives. He co-founded The Hot Sheet, a newsletter for trade and indie authors, which now is owned and operated by Jane Friedman. He formerly was Associate Editor for The FutureBook at London's The Bookseller. Anderson also has worked as a senior producer, editor, and anchor with CNN.com, CNN International, and CNN USA, and as an arts critic (National Critics Institute) with The Village Voice and Dallas Times Herald.